by Michael Merrick
The Labour party is changing. Or rather, the landscape in which it sits is changing and the party is trying to keep pace. The last election brought with it some hard truths, while post-election analysis has offered little solace. The party had become too detached from ordinary people, increasingly rejected by that very constituency it always claimed to naturally represent. The Labour party had been abandoned by the people, just as those very same people claimed that it was the Labour Party who had abandoned them.
Clearly something had to change.
Nonetheless, there were and are still many within the Labour Party who screech themselves hoarse at the merest questioning of contemporary party dogma, the core creeds of an activist left not especially representative of the views of many in the tradition they claim as their own.
Yet the “new politics”, if it was ever anything, was a general and as yet undeveloped realisation that the old status-quo was bust. Difficult questions had to be asked. Difficult answers had to be countenanced. The party was too exclusionary, too ideologically narrow, and too doctrinally puritan. One nation Labour, whilst not devoid of internal contradiction, was partly a reaction to precisely this – the recognition that Labour has once more to become the party of the people.
Yet if change is happening, if politics really is on the cusp of a post-liberal settlement as many insist, then the common existence of liberalism across the political spectrum means that it is also on the cusp of post-party politics, since the post-liberal response also finds expression across the political spectrum.
Paradoxically, if Labour is to rediscover the ability to reach out across the social spectrum, it needs to grasp the post-party mantle. It needs to see itself once more as a movement, not a party, meaning it needs to once again build a social and cultural coalition agitating for change. It needs, in short, to throw open its doors and cease barring entry to those it once welcomed with open arms.
